Lacuna Coil will release their new album Delirium on May 27. Based around the concept of a mental hospital, each song is a story told from a patient’s perspective. Vocalist Cristina Scabbia describes the setting as “This very cold, grey, whitish asylum that holds the spirits of all the previous inmates in it. They are sharing their stories and feelings with us, leading to an album that is heavy and disturbing.”
Here Cristina and co-vocalist Andrea Ferreo gives us a track-by-track guide to what you can expect.
House Of Shame
Cristina: “This was inspired by the story of a real sanatorium in the States. It was said to be haunted, so the song is told from the perspective of the spirit that roams the grounds.”
Andrea: “It was a way to welcome people musically. It describes this situation where you are locked in your bed and don’t quite know what is going on; so it was the perfect song to introduce the place, which is the album. Musically it has lots of double bass drums and female screaming. It’s the perfect opener.”
Broken Place
Cristina: “It’s a song about regrets. About things that you wish you had of done differently.”
Andrea: “It’s about people who are revealing things that are very personal to you. We also use numbers in the chorus because we wanted there to be, not repetition, but some sort of countdown to signify that if you lose these chances now then you may not get them again.”
Cristina: “I think the metaphors are pretty strong in this song, the lyrics are very descriptive. And it’s the heaviness of repeating the same thing over and over.”
Delirium
Andrea: “It’s probably the most catchy song on the album because it’s just repeating the word ‘delirium’ over and over – that’s actually where we got the title from. We wanted to have something that fit in the melody of the song that also made sense to the record, and that’s what we decided on.”
Cristina: “It’s this sense of obsession, medication and passion… all of those words are really prevalent in the song.”
Andrea: “It was actually inspired by a friend of my mum’s, she’s super-intelligent but at times lost it because her brain can’t handle it. She refused to take her medication and ended up having the police break her out of a hotel room. It just showed me how quickly you can lose someone. It isn’t written from her point of view, but she was in my mind when I was writing the lyrics.”
Cristina: “We write a lot in metaphors, and I think if you know where we are coming from and what we’ve seen, you can work out what the songs are about. But it is a challenge.”
Blood, Tears, Dust
Cristina: “This is one of the more epic songs on the album. It’s one of my favourites because of the soaring melodies – every time I hear it I imagine myself flying and looking at everything from above. It’s very descriptive, it talks about mountains and really projects you to up on high looking down.”
Andrea: “We also used some words from an immortality spell in the chorus because we wanted to leave a little magic touch to the song.”
Cristina: “It gives you the sense of someone wanting to get out and be free. Those people that are trapped longing to escape.”
Downfall
Andrea: “Sometimes you feel like there is no way out, but you have to accept that these things are happening to you. We tried to show that there are not just positive things happening in your life but sometimes problems stay with you, and you have to live with them. I think that is very human, and that’s what we tried to show.”
Take Me Home
Cristina: “It’s a total mental trip. We imagined it as a kid’s song, and the train taking us home in the lyrics is sanity. Home is sanity. We love this song, but it isn’t the typical Lacuna Coil song.”
Andrea: “We made it with a kids’ choir, it was a lot of fun to record. We didn’t try and worry about tuning, it made it sound that little bit more weird, we just took it quite light-heartedly.”
You Love Me ‘Cause I Hate You
Cristina: “It talks about the obsession of love. It’s about Stockholm syndrome; you can hear the description of the room from the lyrics, and it’s really about wanting the thing that you can’t have. We only feel complete with this other person, without ever realising that you can be complete on your own.”
Andrea: “It can be applied to many things, a job that you have to go to every day for example. But it’s about trying to escape, you know ‘I have to do it but I hate it.’ That’s why the chorus explodes with a scream like it does at the end.”
Ghost In The Mist
Cristina: “This is about someone who feels alone, a no-one in the world, abandoned and damaged. The ghost in the mist is the perfect representation of that. The ghost is something you don’t see, and the mist clouds it even more. It’s about feeling very small.”
My Demons
Cristina: “It’s about internal torture. It can be applied to different things: relationships, friends, family, whatever you feel trapped by.”
Andrea: “It’s about the trap of being stuck in a routine, you might have done something your whole life that you know is not good for you but you continue to do it. That’s insanity.”
Claustrophobia
Cristina: “I really like the lyric in the beginning, ‘If love is the answer, why does it feel so good to hate’. Hating on the internet is the new popular sport, but love and hate are such strong emotions that it’s easy to confuse them.”
Andrea: “In a relationship you can love someone so much that when they hurt you, it turns to such strong hate. That balance is about not realising why you feel a certain way.”
Ultima Ratio
Cristina: “It’s the last chance you go. We imagined it in a very cinematic way to escape from the hospital, the island, the asylum – and the lyrics reflect that. I’m the guard trying to stop the prisoner from escaping and he is the inmate trying to break free. We leave it quite open so you never really know if he makes it or not.”
Lacuna Coil’s new album Delirium is out May 27, via Century Media.
